As Covid-19 made many laborers non-essential, six strangers came together in 2020 to form a factory like no other. Combating capitalistic ethics and redefining productivism, The Factory stands as a collaborative entity revealing what labor can be. Fueled by a neo-traditional idealism of profit being less important than communal prosperity, The Factory somehow unites its workers through revolving arbitrary power distribution and trust. This is the story of my time working at The Factory, meeting these non-essential strangers, and learning an alternative way of making a living. Though not a single bit of this actually happened outside of my mind. And for that fact, regard the rest as not.

It was the summer of 2022 when I arrived at the front doors of The Factory. I parked my car in the parking lot which was less than half filled. The grounds around the large rectangular building of The Factory were lush with growth. Upon closer inspection there were vegetables being grown in wooden planters and flowers blooming in a multitude of colors. The Factory building itself was painted grey with large black lettering running down the eastern facing wall reading, “WORK LESS, EARN MORE.” The Detroit Journal had called The Factory workers, “lazy communists” in their article covering the workspace claiming that, “The Factory undermines American work ethics... and will collapse as a failed experiment.” Though The Factory had been open now for two years and two months, arguing that if this was an experiment, perhaps it had succeeded.

Before arriving I had emailed Carlos, one of the workers at The Factory, who granted me permission to do my research. Though to do so there was one condition, I had to work. Carlos assured me I would be paid like any other worker and we could discuss in person what that meant, and so I agreed. As I knocked on the front doors of The Factory, I was greeted (after a minute of knocking) by an older woman, probably in her late 60s wearing a bathing suit and dripping with water. She beckoned me in, letting me know that everyone was in the hot tub and I could join to discuss my new job. I ran back out to my car, dug in my suitcase for some gym shorts and a towel and then returned inside The Factory for my interview. The hot tub was a perfect temperature and as I climbed in I was cordially greeted by seven people shoulder deep in steaming water. After introductions I explained my intention for being there (my research and thusly this paper) and they had a few questions for me which led into their explanation of how The Factory functions as a company or more specifically as a Non-Profit Organization.

Beginning two years ago (April, 2020), as a response to the layoffs for non-essential workers during the initial Covid-19 infections, The Factory began as a collective between unemployed or indefinitely furloughed laborers who needed to make a living. Carlos, Joan, Willie May, Morgan, Jian, and Tido, each unemployed from different fields of labor, met coincidentally at a supermarket all gathered around an empty toilet paper rack. The lack of toilet paper led the group to ponder the idea of waste and, with their coincidental unemployment, began to come up with an idea collectively. “The toilet paper will all end up somewhere,” Wille May said from the hot tub, “and we found out where.” It turned out that Morgan’s partner knew of someone working at Detroit's water treatment center and when asked taught the group of ‘waste grit’ consisting of the used toilet paper that was disinfected and then buried at the local waste facility. The group contacted the city and within a couple weeks received the contract to dispose of the ‘waste grit’ for the city. The contract was easily obtained since all the group had to do was undercut the waste management’s previous contract which the city provided. The city paid the group a reasonable wage to do this which was their first source of income. “We just picked these grit cubes up in the back of a rented U-Haul truck and stored them here [referring to The Factory] until we had enough money from the city to begin production,” Tido informed me. The property The Factory lived on was an abandoned plant from the 1960s which closed after the company outsourced its labor to Korea. After storing the waste grit for 6 months (through a previous lease), the group collectively saved enough money (from the city’s contract payments) to buy the property and begin the next process of production.

“We turn waste into life. Shit into gold.”

First the group needed to form a Non-Profit Organization to legalize such efforts. They were able to be classified as a recycling center and the organization's purpose was legalized by the Treasury of Michigan and the federal government easily and unanimously. The Factory then took the disinfected waste grit and with Joan’s guidance (she was a chemistry teacher at the local community college before the shutdown) began to break down the used toilet paper into glucose which was then converted into glycolic acid. The process was tedious but simple, but most importantly (as the group informed me) cost next to nothing. Glycolic acid is widely used in many skin-care products, known for its anti-aging properties. “We turn waste into life. Shit into gold,” Carlos said as steam rose from the hot tub water around him, “that is real alchemy and Joan here is the philosopher’s stone.” Though after learning of the product The Factory makes, I needed to know what I was expected to do as a laborer. So I asked, but everyone just said relax, and that we can talk about it tomorrow because the work was done for today. I took it that my interview was successful and I was hired because I returned the next day and work began.

What makes The Factory a point of interest, when compared to other factories within the capitalistic structure of the United States, is threefold. First, there is no ownership or profit (The Factory being a NPO requires such, legally speaking). Second, wages are not defined by hours worked but by a salary regardless of time spent working (with no minimum or maximum requirement for hours). Thirdly, the work ethic manifested within the walls of The Factory may be immoral within the ethos of capitalistic idealism. To discuss these three facets let us form comparisons to articulate the transcendental utopian nature of The Factory, one that doesn’t exist elsewhere in the United States.

As work began on my first day, I was introduced to the framework of ownership and profit within The Factory. To follow the non-distribution constraint of a NPO, The Factory must regulate the profits that could be determined as individual gain in the pockets of the employees (Easley 1983: 532). The Factory thus, for every employee, gives an equal share of the profits. The individual laborer’s salary is reflective of a UBI or universal basic income, for it is constant regardless of the amount of work. Ownership is similarly dismantled and equally socialized. A ‘501(c)(3)’ type NPO requires there to be no owner, the organization cannot be owned because there is no profit to own. The NPO itself is the entity that controls any equity that exists, and the appointed board members control the NPO. The original six people who began The Factory have since added to the board every employee currently employed. Though interestingly, the board has a president, who is given 49% control of decision making. The remaining 51% is spread equally amongst everyone else on the board (all of the other employees). The president is chosen every month at random through a game of ‘short straw.’ Whoever pulls the shortest straw out of a stack becomes the president of The Factory for the next month. The Factory used to elect the president democratically but they realized a major flaw in democratic elections: someone will always be in the minority and thus unhappy. The ‘short straw’ game puts everyone in the minority except the president which The Factory finds more inclusive.

There is no classist delineation, as Karl Marx argues as intrinsic within capitalism; there is no proletariat nor bourgeoisie (Marx & Engels 2011: 1-4). The labor power of the workers in The Factory is not commodified, for they do not “sell themselves piecemeal, [as] a commodity,” (Marx & Engels 2011: 3). There is no capitalist, no bourgeoisie, for the landowners and business owners are the same who labor; their relationship with each other and their power only shifts through a revolving hierarchy shorn from liminal randomization. The salary I was given seemingly defied the logic of capitalistic productivity. The salary was almost triple the state’s minimum wage and on top of the paycheck The Factory paid for healthcare, food stipends, and covered unlimited paid time off. But how does the work get done?

For The Factory to earn enough income to pay the salaries of each worker (among other overhead costs) there is a minimum amount of labor each day that must take place and every employee collectively agrees to this understanding. Each day (four days a week) there is 16 hours of total labor required to produce enough glycolic acid to maintain the profits required to remain stable. Those 16 hours of labor can be divided between two workers (each working eight hours a day) or eight workers (each working two hours a day). There is no authority needed to enforce the hours required, it is just known and collectively agreed. And somehow the work each day gets done. One worker, Jackson, hadn’t worked in over a year; he was backpacking across Brasil. Jian assured me this was completely acceptable. Jackson would “of course” still receive his monthly salary. The Factory, when profits increased, had to hire more employees for there cannot be any capital accumulation. If there is an accumulation of capital (generated through overproduction) The Factory simply hires another employee and pays them the same salary as the other workers. “He [Jackson] will be back eventually, but it doesn’t matter when,” Jian stated, “What is most important is that we, as a group, do the minimum required to keep us all floating.” Jian and his fellow workers at The Factory were united in a way that contradicted the ethos of capitalism. Marx and Engels argue that the laborer (proletariat) exists as a creation solely to labor for the bourgeoisie, and that their work ethic is a means of survival within the capitalist system (Marx & Engels 2011: 3-4). The Factory workers labor only to provide for their collective, and only work enough, rarely more than is needed. The constraints of the NPO prevent any sort of profit accumulation and, for The Factory, this constraint is the means of broadening their collective. Max Weber argued that this ethic is the traditionalist approach to labor, the formal “opponent” to the ethics of capitalism (Weber 1958: 58-59). That the, “opportunity of earning more was less attractive than that of working less” (Weber 1958: 60). Weber defines the intrinsic quality of capitalism that counters such a traditionalist viewpoint as “identical with the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit by means of continuous, rational, capitalistic enterprise” (Weber 1958: 17). The Factory exists within the modern state’s capitalistic allowances, though the ethics that fuel it both transcend and subvert contemporary capitalist ethics. Work ethic at The Factory is understood most easily through how the workers express their version of productivism.

Kathi Weeks points out in her book The Problem with Work the productivist ethic “assume[s] that productivity is what defines and redefines us,” and that when our efforts “are not directed to productive ends,” such efforts manifest wasted, non-instrumental, idle, corrupt, and shameful qualities of human nature (Weeks 2011: 170). Being idle at The Factory is quite literally the goal of the entire enterprise, though only in relation to the actual work. The Factory does not require its laborers to associate work with life, and life with work. The means for earning an income does not relate to an individual's productivity and thus the ethos around such a concept antithesizes what productivity means to them. The Factory emphasizes the difference between what should be done and what will be done by measuring such without importance placed on accumulation of profit. There is a dissolution of individualism for each worker at The Factory which manifests from this neo-traditional productivist idealism. Each isolated worker is equally responsible and exempt from the functionality of such productivism for it is only through the dissolving of individualized jobs and the formation of a collaboration that allows for an ideology like this to function. When you relate this type of productivism to the product that is produced, the anti-aging skincare product, the relationship between the workers and the product is also a collaboration. For without the product being commodified in the eyes of the consumer who believes they need such a product, The Factory would dissolve. There is a symbiosis between the waste society produces, the desires of consumers, and The Factory workers. This relationship is what allows this new type of productivism to arise, for without the waste of society and the desires of the consumers, The Factory workers could not experiment in this collaborative way. And within the walls of The Factory, the neo-traditionalist productivism requires no authority, no ruling class, no ethical interference, nor stigmatization to function successfully; it only requires trust, collaboration, waste, and consumers.

"…no authority, no ruling class, no ethical interference…"

After working at The Factory for a few months I could run the entire chemical process of turning the waste grit into glycolic acid by myself, though I rarely did. Joan enjoyed that work, so most days I gardened or didn't show up to The Factory at all. I grew vegetables and built a chicken coop on The Factory’s property, harvesting enough for each worker to take home some eggs and veggies on a regular basis. I drew the short straw for my 13th month of work, and as president I suggested we double production for the month (which was agreed upon unanimously) and with the profits we built an art classroom for three local elementary schools. As profits eventually increased (through minimal hyper-productivity, lower production costs, or increased demand), others were hired. The hiring process consisted of vetting those without generational capitalistic wealth and attempted to deracialize the applicants through the process of anonymous interviews (which also helped remove the biases of the interviewers). Job postings for The Factory could only be found in homeless shelters and social service, welfare, and parole offices. Alternatively abled people were encouraged to apply, as well as all types of neurological functioning (given a few conditions regarding stability). Overall, The Factory’s efforts to expand revealed their importance of highlighting the racialization and subsequent privilege built from the history of capitalism (in the United States) and how to repair what had been lost; not as a means of refusal, but as a means of capitalization upon the principles that erected such inequities to begin with.

Today marks my two year anniversary of working for The Factory and with such an event comes an end. The only way to be let go from The Factory is to miss four board meetings in a row (except under certain excused circumstances) and today I missed my fourth board meeting. And so my labor ends. Such an end brings into question what labor can be. My time spent working at The Factory allowed me to see the fundamental aspects of what I thought impossible in terms of collaboration, trust, and living. The more I think about it, The Factory isn’t a factory at all, rather it is an ecosystem thriving off the capitalistic environment that sprung it. Finding contentment in the accumulation of community members rather than monetary profit The Factory blooms like a wildflower from the cracks of a paved sidewalk. Instead of revolutionizing the social and economic conditions of the system The Factory is built within, it revolutionizes the minds of the individuals who work there. I always thought the words painted on the side of The Factory, “WORK LESS, EARN MORE” was about earning more money, but maybe there are different ways to earn more. Maybe we can earn more life, more time, more contentment, or just more anything other than more work.

Bretton Archer Copyright 2021

Bibliography:

Easley, D., & O’Hara, M. (1983). The Economic Role of the Nonprofit Firm. The Bell Journal of Economics, 531–538. https://doi.org/10.2307/3003654

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2011). The Communist Manifesto. New York: Penguin Books.

Weber, M., Parsons, T., & Tawney, R. H. (1958). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribner

Weeks, K. (2011). The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Duke University Press.